Developing a two-stage procedure for Estimating Origin-Destination matrix based on routes and traffic volumes

Estimating Origin-Destination matrix, named O-D matrix or ODM, is an important issue in transportation planning. Due to need to survey movements on the network, estimating ODM is usually considered as a high-cost measure in transportation planning. In this research work, a two-stage procedure, including solving routing problem and minimizing the difference between observed and estimated traffic volumes on the network, has been developed to estimate the O-D matrix elements. At the first stage, routing problem is solved to determine paths while in the second stage an absolute error function has been defined to determine the number of trips from each origin to destination pairs. The procedure has been applied in an illustrative example and results show that the proposed procedure can be utilized for estimating OD matrix elements with a good accuracy.